Archive for November, 2010

Play Speed Scrabble on your iPad

Friday, November 12th, 2010

Exciting news! Speed Scrabble is now compatible with the iPad. Yeeha!

Speed Scrabble iPad

To play Speed Scrabble on the iPad, just drag the letters around with your fingers to form words. Too easy!

Your iPad might just give you the competitive advantage over your mouse-based opponents… or simply a more enjoyable way to brush up on your word skills.

If you have an iPad, please try out the updated Speed Scrabble game.

As always, feedback is welcome… we are aware that the background grid can get a little messed up during play on the iPad, this shouldn’t interfere with the game play.

We hope to tweak the iPad experience in future releases – and potentially release an iPad app.

Now, go try it out! Happiness is word games

Posted in fun, games, happiness, iPad, puzzles, speed scrabble | 2 Comments »

Ultra Simple PHP Profiling – Hack it #8

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

We wanted to profile a few PHP scripts, so we tried xdebug, but there were a few issues:

  • Not suitable for a production server
  • Difficult to turn on/off for specific scripts and requests
  • Difficult to profile MySQL queries, without also attracting a mass of other data

xdebug is better for offline application profiling.

If you just want to track down a bottleneck, or see what your script is spending all its time doing, here’s a simple alternative.

To profile your SQL, replace mysql_query with mysql_queryx.

This generates a CSV file at /tmp/profile.1 for easy analysis.

Now create the file profile.php:

Too easy!

To stop profiling a page, set $profile = false.

If you’re concerned about performance, do something like $profile = rand(0, 100) > 99.

Posted in hack, php, technical | No Comments »

Jouez à Speed Scrabble (scrabble rapide) en français

Sunday, November 7th, 2010

FranceSupernifty a le plaisir d’annoncer que Speed Scrabble est maintenant accessible en français.

Si votre langue maternelle est le français, ou si vous voulez travailler vos réflexes en français, alors essayez French Speed Scrabble!

To play in French:

  • Visit Speed Scrabble
  • Click “Refresh” on your browser to get the latest version of the game
  • Login
  • Click “Play”
  • Click the pencil next to “English”, to change to “French”
  • Click “Start game”
  • Make words in French!

Feedback on the French incarnation is welcomed.

Thanks Sylviane for the French translationHappy

Posted in french, fun, games, speed scrabble | No Comments »

Server Upgrade

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

Server upgrade
Supernifty’s servers have recently been upgraded.

Our old server was barely coping with the load, particularly that generated by Speed Scrabble, so Supernifty is now on a faster, more powerful server.

This means a zippy, more reliable experience for everyone. If you do encounter problems, please get in touch. You may have encountered a few timeouts during the migration, but now everything appears to be great.

Finally, if you’re interested in the technical details, main components of the Supernifty architecture include:

Posted in speed scrabble, technical, webmaster | 1 Comment »